"But there is further reason, and a pressing one today, why we
should write upon our present subject, and that is to expose the modern
and pernicious error of Dispensationalism. This is a device of the Enemy,
designed to rob the children of no small part of that bread which their
heavenly Father has provided for their souls; a device wherein the wily
serpent appears as an angel of light, feigning to "make the Bible
a new book" by simplifying much in it which perplexes the spiritually
unlearned. It is sad to see how widely successful the devil has been
by means of this subtle innovation."

God Bless America! God help me, I am an American.
I am a combat veteran of Vietnam, (retired as a Marine Reserve
Colonel in 1994), served as a Defense and National Security official
in the Reagan and Bush administrations and have been a Constitutional
attorney for 30 years, but I have a sense the Vietnam veterans,
those with hair a little thinner and grayer, are now going the
way of the WWII and Korean War veterans. The wars we fought are
fading into a past fast compressing, as today’s troubles
magnify in the Middle East. But, before we fade from view into
a forgotten history, let us remind America of our Times and Wars
in hopes that the lives spent and the lessons learned can be applied
with all due diligence and care as we consider the Middle East.

On
September 11, 2001, America experienced the greatest national
security failure in its history and one year later no one has
been held publicly accountable. Instead the government is asking
Americans to forsake their liberty for a renewed promise of security
as Clinton’s CIA director is still in place in the Bush
administration and the “Homeland Security” program,
prepared during the Clinton years, is being implemented.

How many of
you remember the raw terror that gripped America during the 1962
Cuban missile crisis? Bomb drills were conducted in classrooms
across America and nightly television news broadcasted repeatedly
the threat of Communist Russian nuclear attacks to be launched
from Cuba. In September 1960, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev
had set the world stage by declaring to America, we will “bury
you,” as he hammered the heel of his shoe on the table at
the United Nations. In late July 1962, as Americans busied themselves
building bomb shelters and stocked them with provisions as annihilation
seemed eminent from nuclear attack, over sixty Soviet ships were
en-route to Cuba with some of them carrying military material.

The “terror”
then, much more so than now, was extremely tense, and the enemy
with America in it’s crosshairs, truly formidable. Rather
than make the “first strike” and begin what all knew
meant World War III on our own land, President John F. Kennedy
revealed to the world America’s vastly superior intelligence
capability of the U-2 spy planes. Kennedy’s presidential
duty was to prove to the world and all Americans why he was committing
an “act of war” by blockading Cuba during the time
now known as the 13 days of the “Missiles of October.”
Revealing the evidence for the blockade, the president made to
Americans the case for risking war:

Kennedy spoke
to the US people (and the Soviet government) in a televised address
on October 22. He announced the naval blockade as a quarantine
zone of 500 miles around the Cuban coast, warned that the military
was "prepare[d] for any eventualities", and condemned
the Soviet "secrecy and deception".

After my combat
service in South Vietnam, I was older than most other students
at the University of Louisville Law School in 1969. Wearing a
suit, tie and a silver star, when jeans, long hair and anti-war
talk was the fashion, Kentucky Senator Thruston Morton, on a visit
to the law school, picked me out of a group to spend a rare 4-5
minutes with.

Can you imagine
my surprise and stunned sorrow as he confessed to me the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution that he voted on and which got us into the
Vietnam War for eleven bloody years, was based on lies. Senator
Morton told me the Johnson administration had made fools of the
Congress, who were told to simply trust the administration. No
proofs were made then to the American people for the need to go
to war in Vietnam. I would learn later that Senator Fulbright
declared in a “closed session” of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on March 7, 1968, that the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, is “like any contract based on misrepresentation…null
and void.”

On that day,
March 7, 1968, 9000 miles away at the sharp end of the Tonkin
Resolution, it was anything but “null and void.” The
Tet Offensive, the turning point of the Vietnam War, was winding
down. I was at Hue City, where the fighting was bitter, house
to house, with little or no supporting arms, and many young American
men died. Their deaths were not “null and void.”

Since Vietnam,
books published reveal the media complicity in the lie, led by
“the most trusted man in America,” CBS’s Walter
Cronkite. From the safe side of the Perfume river in Vietnam,
Cronkite deliberately reported our hard won victory at Hue as
a strategic defeat for America. This “harsh military setback
for Hanoi” many young Americans had secured with their lives
was reported by a man who later confessed his intent on world
government.

I took an
oath at 17, “so help me God,” to “defend the
Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
History, from our Times and Wars, shows the “Best and the
Brightest” in the government and media simply misled the
People. My fellow Kentuckians, before we STRIKE in the Middle
East, let’s be sure that what America does FIRST upholds
the Constitution and that our way of life as free and independent
people is not diminished.

Amid the current
media clamor, listen closely for hard evidence. This veteran of
battles from rice paddies to the paneled halls of power knows
in war America must be sure about who our enemy is, where that
enemy is located beyond any reasonable doubt, what the mission
is and what is the expected victory to be won. As Americans, you
are the government. As Reagan said, don’t simply trust,
“trust and verify.” You are responsible to have the
proofs before our sons, and now our daughters, are sent half a
world away to die again for our way of life. As the man who led
the effort to build the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial to
remember the service and sacrifice of the Kentuckians numbered
among the 58,000 who did not return home from Vietnam, I advise
you to listen well to the lessons learned in the Wars and Terrors
past, so Americans, that is you, never have to lament being fooled
again.

When
confronted by the type of inanity which so dominates the Modern Evangelical
New Testament American Christian (MENTAC) landscape today, one is
tempted to become cynical and angry-sins as grievous as the inanity
itself.